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Particle Follies

Walter Murch, the veteran film editor and sound designer, who has won Academy Awards for his contributions to “Apocalypse Now” and “The English Patient,” spent a few months last summer in an editing suite on West Twenty-fifth Street, doing post-production on a documentary about the Large Hadron Collider. The movie, “Particle Fever,” charts the progress of a group of theoretical and experimental physicists over five years, covering the L.H.C.’s construction, its switching on, its almost immediate and horrifying breaking down, in 2008, and its repair and restoration. The film concludes with the announcement, last July, that repeated particle collisions had, finally, made it possible to detect the existence of the elusive Higgs field, which was theorized by physicists as long ago as the nineteen-sixties—and which, physicists say, gave rise to all the matter in the universe—but had never been proved experimentally. The result, the filmmakers hope, is a scientific story that’s comprehensible to the layperson: the ultimate reality movie, as the film’s tagline says.

Recently, over lunch at Milanes, a Dominican restaurant near the studio, Murch reflected on the sound qualities of the L.H.C., which lies underground near Geneva, and the work being done there. He explained that scientists have sonified the data output of the L.H.C., and tuned it so that it falls within the acoustic spectrum, in the hope of recognizing patterns that might not otherwise be evident. “This means we can hear the music of this machine,” he said. “It has a rhythm and a harmonic pulse that is very intriguing.” When asked if it sounded like anything he recognized, Murch said, “If you played it to me without my knowing anything more, I would say that it is from Brazil. You are tapping into the heart of the universe, so maybe the universe is Brazilian. The door to it just happened to be in Switzerland.”

The most challenging aspect of editing such a movie, Murch said, was combining the elucidation of particle physics with a human narrative. Murch’s own education was in Romance languages and literature, but he has long read science for fun. In 1986, while he was working on “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” in France, he came across a French book on cosmology, in which the author explained the Higgs field by quoting a story from “Kaputt,” an often lyrical account of the Second World War by Curzio Malaparte, the Italian journalist and provocateur. In Malaparte’s telling, there was, during the Siege of Leningrad, a sudden cold snap. “When that happens, if water is very pure it can drop below the point of freezing without freezing,” Murch said. “Then all it takes is some agitation or impurity to tap the water on the shoulder and say, ‘You should be frozen now,’ and it will suddenly, instantly freeze. So during the Siege of Leningrad there happened to be a forest fire, and hundreds of Soviet horses ran into the lake, and that was enough to cause the lake to freeze. In the morning, it was like a diabolical Greek sculpture garden, with horses in a position of agony, having been flash-frozen. The Higgs field is a similar kind of instantaneous freezing of the quark soup right after the big bang.” Murch took a bite of his Cuban sandwich. “Electrons acquire mass, and now they are kind of like the horses stuck in the water.”

Murch is working with slightly less cinematic imagery in “Particle Fever”—there is a lot of footage of scientists in conference rooms—though the L.H.C. itself, with all its minuscule components making a looming, awesome whole, looks as if it were made for the movies: “Metropolis” meets the Death Star. Its subatomic product, the Higgs boson, has been called the “God particle” by one prominent physicist, Leon Lederman. When he was asked whether his sense of reverence had been increased or diminished by contemplating the L.H.C., Murch paused. “I think of a Muriel Rukeyser quote, where she says the universe is made of stories, not of atoms,” he said. “The tension is between finding ever more detail about atomic structure, and the story. It could be the equivalent of somebody looking at an old film, and realizing that the film came from a projector, and discovering that there is an image in the projector, and that it’s made of molecules of grains of film—and then trying to find the mystery of the story by looking at ever more detailed molecules of film, thinking, If I finally get to the heart of that, will it tell me where my story comes from? While we know these are two separate universes.”

He took another bite of his sandwich before heading back to the editing room. “It may be that our story, whatever that is—existence—depends on the Higgs boson and atoms, but it depends on it the way the film depends on the molecular structure of the celluloid,” he went on. “That just happens to be the medium through which it is manifest, but the story predates the film and, in fact, actually created the film itself.” ♦